I run Gentoo on my desktop. It lives on a separate drive, and I use it from time to time whenever I have Linux-related work to do. Recently, though, the install has been feeling its age and certain things have required extensive changes to the base system (specifically new versions of device-mapper).

This post is a warning to anyone wishing to switch to baselayout-2:

MAKE SURE YOUR SYSTEM IS UPDATED BEFORE MIGRATING!

If you’ve used and built packages from source, chances are you’ve run into some derivation of this dreadful message:

libtool: link: `/usr/lib/libgnomevfs-2.la' is not a valid libtool archive

Unfortunately, there are a few potential causes ranging from broken packages to missing packages, but in general, they are the result of broken dependencies (missing packages are broken dependencies, after all!). Read on about some potential workarounds and solutions!

I was at university today when I realized I had disabled my WinVNC service over the weekend in order to isolate a problem that–as it turns out–was not related to VNC. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to restart the service and was left with no way to remote into my desktop at home. Worse, since I’ve been using Visual Studio a lot, I configured the bootloader to enter Windows by default rather than Gentoo–so no hope of fixing things remotely from there, either. As it turns out, however, the problem wasn’t nearly as difficult as I made it out to be.